Similarly, the Greek traveler Megasthenes claimed to know about dog-headed people in India who lived in the mountains, communicated through barking, wore the skins of wild animals and lived by hunting. In the fifth century BC, the Greek physician Ctesias, in his Indica, wrote a detailed report on the existence of cynocephali in India. Reports of dog-headed races can also be traced back to Greek antiquity. In an Ancient Egyptian hybrid image, the head represents the original form of the being depicted, so that, as the Egyptologist Henry Fischer put it, "a lion-headed goddess is a lion-goddess in human form, while a royal sphinx, conversely, is a man who has assumed the form of a lion." This non-literal approach to depicting deities may have confused visitors from Greece, leading them to believe that Egyptians worshipped cynocephalic gods, or even that mortal cynocephalic entities populated Egypt. Rather than literally depicting a hybrid human-animal state, these cynocephalic portrayals of deities conveyed those deities' therianthropic ability to shift between fully human and fully animal states. The Greek word ( Greek: κῠνοκέφᾰλοι) "dog-head" also identified a sacred Egyptian baboon with the face of a dog. The same "dog" root is found in the name Cynomorpha ("dog-shaped") for a sub-group of the family Cercopithecidae, which contains many species of macaques and baboons.Ĭynocephaly was familiar to the ancient Greeks from representations of the Egyptian gods, Duamutef (son of Horus), Wepwawet (the opener of the ways), and Anubis (the Egyptian god of the dead). The word cynocephaly is taken (through Latin) from the Greek word κυνοκέφαλοι kynokephaloi, plural of the word κυνοκέφαλος, from kyno– (combining form of κύων kyōn) meaning "dog" and κεφαλή kephalē meaning "head". In addition, the Greeks and Romans called a species of apes cynocephalus (these apes are suspected to be baboons). Cynocephaly is generally distinguished from lycanthropy (werewolfism) and dogs that can talk. In modern popular culture cynocephalics are also encountered as characters in books, comics, and graphic novels. Further mentions come from the medieval East and Europe. Such cynocephalics are known in mythology and legend from many parts of the world, including ancient Egypt, India, Greece, and China. The literal meaning of cynocephaly is "dog-headedness" however, that this refers to a human body with a dog head is implied. The characteristic of cynocephaly, or cynocephalus ( / s aɪ n oʊ ˈ s ɛ f ə l i/), having the head of a canid, typically that of a dog or jackal, is a widely attested mythical phenomenon existing in many different forms and contexts. For other uses, see Doghead (disambiguation).
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